Artist rendering of Vinyard Wind’s offshore wind energy project
By the Associated Press in the New Haven Register
EDGARTOWN, Mass. (AP) — The company hoping to build a wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts appealed to the state Friday after the project hit snags with local and federal regulators.
The Edgartown Conservation Commission on Martha’s Vineyard voted this week to deny Vineyard Wind’s application to lay transmission cables that would pass about a mile east of Edgartown.
Separately, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has delayed issuing a final environmental impact statement that would help clear the way for construction of the 84-turbine, 800-megawatt wind farm.
The project is key to a 2016 state law aimed at boosting supplies of renewable energy.
The agency says sulfoxaflor poses less risk than alternatives and is a critical tool for farmers.
Toni Burnham, president of DC Beekeepers Alliance, checks on the health of a honey bee colony where D.C. Water keeps four beehives on the rooftop of one of its buildings in 2017. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
Brady Dennis reports for the Washington Post – July 12
The Environmental Protection Agency approved broad new applications Friday for a controversial insecticide, despite objections from environmental groups and beekeepers who say it is among the compounds responsible for eviscerating the nation’s bee populations.
Alexandra Dunn, head of the EPA office that oversees pesticides, said the agency was “thrilled” to be able to approve new uses and lift past restrictions on sulfoxaflor, which she called a “highly effective” tool for growers around the country — but which the agency itself considers “very highly toxic” to bees. The decision will allow the chemical to be applied to a wide array of crops, including citrus and corn, soybeans and strawberries, pineapples and pumpkins.
“EPA is providing long-term certainty for U.S. growers to use an important tool to protect crops and avoid potentially significant economic losses while maintaining strong protection for pollinators,” Dunn said.
The agency’s critics, some of whom successfully sued the EPA in federal court during the Obama administration to restrict the use of the pesticide, were anything but thrilled with Friday’s announcement.
“At a time when honeybees and other pollinators are dying in greater numbers than ever before, EPA’s decision to remove restrictions on yet another bee-killing pesticide is nothing short of reckless,” Greg Loarie, an attorney for the environmental advocacy group Earthjustice, said in an email.
The news comes during a time that commercial honeybee colonies have been declining at a startling rate. The annual loss rate for honeybees during the year ending in April rose to 40.7 percent, up slightly over the annual average of 38.7 percent, according to the Bee Informed Partnership, a nonprofit group associated with the University of Maryland.
Alaska Army National Guard helicopter crews fought a wildfire on July 4, 2019. This state is suffering through heat waves that have melted sea ice weeks early and dried vegetation, fueling one of Alaska’s biggest fire years on record to this date.
Under the choking black smoke from the bog and forest fires in Siberia and Alaska, it can feel like the Earth itself is burning. The normally moist, black organic peat soil and lush forests have been drying, and when they catch fire, they burn relentlessly.
Global warming has been thawing tundra and drying vast stretches of the far-northern boreal forests, and it also has spurred more thunderstorms with lightning, which triggered many of the fires burning in Alaska this year, said Brian Brettschneider, a climate scientist with the International Arctic Research Center who closely tracks Alaskan and Arcticextreme weather.
So far this year, wildfires have scorched more than 1.2 million acres in Alaska, making it one of the state’s three biggest fire years on record to this date, with high fire danger expected to persist in the weeks ahead.
Several studies, as well as ongoing satellite monitoring, show that fires are spreading farther north into the Arctic, burning more intensely and starting earlier in the year, in line with what climate models have long suggested would happen as sea ice dwindles and ocean and air temperatures rise.
“When it comes to the Arctic heat waves, the wildfires, am I surprised? No — this was long predicted. Am I worried? Yes,” said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann.
By Jeff Blumenthal – Reporter, Philadelphia Business Journal
The Philadelphia Inquirer has fewer than five years to make fundamental changes to its business, products, operations and culture or it risks financial peril, management told employees in a new strategic plan.
“The economic challenges of our industry and the dominance of the major tech platforms pose mortal threats to our long-term sustainability,” Inquirer management said. “At our current trajectory, we know that in five years we will be buried under a debt load that will be next to impossible to overcome.”
Management emailed the eight-page memo, entitled “Unlocking A New Era Of Inquirer Journalism,” to employees late last month while negotiating buyout packages as part of what it deemed necessary cost-cutting.
The Inquirer, which also operates the Daily News and Inquirer.com (formerly Philly.com), noted that the company was impacted more than some of its peers by “cataclysmic” changes in the news industry over the past 15 years due to its ownership turmoil. But with those issues in the rearview mirror, it has made what it described as meaningful changes such as merging three newsrooms into one, rebranding under the Inquirer name and introducing a digital subscription product.
But it admitted that it has largely failed to solidify its digital footprint, and the company’s quest for a viable business model remains elusive. So for the past four months, the senior leadership team has held weekly off-site meetings to identify a common vision, cultural changes and a sustainable business model.
“We need to make some tough but necessary decisions about the future of our print product,” management wrote. “We need to secure resources to invest in digital operations, and we need to attract new audiences with content that they are willing to pay for.”
Before getting into specifics about its plans, management provided its take on the newspaper industry, highlighting deep declines in print circulation and advertising revenue, with digital advertising revenue being insufficient to offset those trends. The response from newspaper companies has been cutting costs, largely through staff reductions such as those endured at The Inquirer in 2015, 2017 and just this month.
But the Inquirer said there are some bright spots amid the gloom, including digital consumer revenue, which is on the rise across the industry, philanthropic collaborations, and growth of an events business.
America has a major food waste problem, and New Jersey is no exception.
Upwards of 40% of food in America is never eaten and just gets thrown out, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It’s a problem that has plagued the Garden State for years, but legislation has also stalled for years in Trenton as other nearby states like New York and Vermont passed their own laws.
In 2017, Gov. Chris Christie signed a law setting a goal to cut New Jersey’s food waste in half by 2030. One way to do that is to expand composting, and a bill sitting on Gov. Phil Murphy’s desk now tries to do just that.
The bill, S1206/A3726, would require businesses and organizations that generate large amounts of food waste — at least 52 tons per year — to separate it from other garbage and recycle it. That’s big for the growth of “food waste facilities,” where food recycling is done through methods like composting or anaerobic digestion, which produces methane.
But in last-minute amendments, the bill’s definition of “food waste facilities” was expanded to include incinerators for four years and landfills indefinitely — the two least preferred methods of handling food waste, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
That change has angered advocacy groups, who are concerned that the amendments undercut long-sought efforts to boost New Jersey composting.
“We’re saying now that the landfilling of food waste is recycling. And incinerating food waste is recycling,” Marie Kruzan, the executive director of the Association of New Jersey Recyclers, said of the amended bill. “No one else in the country says that, but New Jersey does.”
The inclusion of incinerators, in particular, is stoking outrage. New Jersey is home to four power-generating incinerators, all owned by the company Covanta. Those incinerators are all located in poor communities and frequently raise environmental justice concerns and worries over public health effects.
“This bill would effectively generate more greenhouse gases and contribute to air pollution in overburdened communities through the burning and burying of waste that could be diverted via more sustainable mechanisms like composting,” the Ironbound Community Corporation said in a previous statement opposing the late amendments.
Connecticut’s newly passed bag bill marks an incremental step forward in plastic reduction efforts. It’s also being described as a missed opportunity by many involved in the process.
As finalized in a budget bill recently signed by Gov. Ned Lamont, Connecticut will require retailers to charge a 10-cent fee for any “single-use checkout bag” starting Aug. 1. By July 1, 2021, all such bags will be banned entirely.
The law defines “single-use” as plastic bags less than 4 mils thick – excluding bags for meat, fish, produce, newspapers and dry cleaning. The dozen-plus municipalities that already have their own policies in place will be allowed to keep them, and others can still pass stricter ordinances.
Environmental groups wanted to see paper bags included as well, while companies in the organics world pushed for compostable bags to be exempted entirely. The final version has resulted in a universally palatable stalemate of sorts, but tension remains after a heated legislative process.
Path to the ban
“We’ve been advocating for a ban on plastic checkout bags with a charge on paper bags, with the end goal of obviously producing a policy that promotes reusable bag use,” said Lou Burch, state program director for the Citizens Campaign for the Environment (CCE). “This law does not do that. However, we do think it’s a good step in the right direction.”
CCE, Surfrider Foundation and the Connecticut Food Association originally pushed a bill that went much further than what has now been enacted, or even what preceded it.
The legislature’s favored bag bill, passed out of the General Assembly’s environment committee in April, would have banned single-use bags made of “plastic, paper or other material” by 2020. Paper bags would be allowed if they were deemed 100% recyclable, made from 40% post-consumer recycled content and included the phrase “Please Reuse and Recycle This Bag.”
This open-ended language raised the alarm for two companies with Connecticut interests — Novamont, an Italian bioplastics company and Quantum Biopower, owner of the state’s first anaerobic digester.
The two have been ongoing partners in an effort to expand organics processing in Connecticut. Quantum is actively looking for ways to attract residential tonnage, and Novamont saw an opportunity to expand market share for bags to line those hypothetical curbside carts.
In fact, Novamont told Waste Dive it was actively pursuing plans to build a new manufacturing facility in the state.
